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“Shoot.”
“You ever think about settling down, getting married, having kids?”
“I didn’t before.” I mean, I did, but only when my mother reminded me that as an only child, I was responsible for giving her grandchildren. Those reminders came more often after I’d turned twenty-nine.
“It’s different now, right?”
It occurred to me that maybe Halo had a specific reason for asking. “Is there anyone you’ve been, you know, seeing?”
“Negative. What about you?”
“There’s someone.” What the fuck? Had my life almost ending in a plane crash given me a death wish? If I told Halo the woman I’d been fantasizing about was his sister, I wouldn’t live to walk off this plane.
“There is? Who is she?”
“That isn’t important right now. If or when that changes, I’ll let you know.”
“Seriously?”
“She might not feel the same way I do.” That was an honest response, considering Sloane would have no way of knowing she even crossed my mind.
“Is it someone I know?”
Shaking my head felt like less of a lie than saying the words out loud. Why hadn’t I just kept my stupid mouth shut? I felt a barrier go up between Halo and me, and it was of my making. We’d known each other long enough that he could easily sense when I wasn’t telling the truth. Like he just had.
We were quiet the remainder of the flight; I feigned sleep for most of it.
2
Sloane
I bolted upright, drenched in a cold sweat, and covered my face with my hands. The door to my bedroom flung open, and my mother raced in. She sat on the edge of my bed and gently pulled my hands from my face. “What’s wrong? Did you have another nightmare?”
I nodded. “How did you know?”
“I heard you cry out.”
“What did I say?”
“Nothing decipherable.”
Thank God. I’d been dreaming about Tackle, not my brother, as I was sure my mother assumed.
She stroked my hair. “Go back to sleep, mija. We don’t have to leave for the airport for a few more hours.”
She sat between me and the clock on the nightstand and my phone that sat beside it. “What time is it now?”
“A little after eight.”
Given that most days I was up by five, I considered eight sleeping in. However, the last few days had been so emotionally draining, my sleep patterns were completely off.
Seven days ago, the day before Thanksgiving, my brother, Knox, whom everyone called Halo, along with his best friend, Landry, whom everyone called Tackle, had been deployed on an intelligence mission on behalf of the US government.
Both my brother and Tackle were former CIA agents who now contracted for the agency through a private intelligence and security company.
Before they left, I’d had a good idea where they were headed. While the information was classified, as a criminal investigator for the US Department of Homeland Security, my security-clearance level was high enough to know the op they’d been hired to carry out involved apprehending a suspected terrorist with ties to the Islamic State.
I’d been tracking the same man’s—Abdul Ghafor—communication with known terrorist cells in the US for months. His last confirmed whereabouts were outside Bagram in Afghanistan, but sources had recently spotted him in Colombia.
